Over the last two decades outdoor navigation devices have been embraced by the general public. Satellite navigation using the GPS and Glonass satellites became available to consumers initially in the form of dedicated navigation devices, but has really taken off following the introduction of such functionality in smartphones. Apart from providing directions, e.g. in car navigation, such devices are also increasingly being used for providing location aware services.
A similar need for directions and location aware services exists in indoor areas. For example in large indoor complexes, such as hospitals, universities, parking lots, shopping malls, and/or offices.
In an indoor setting satellite based navigation technology generally does not provide sufficient signal strength to be able to perform indoor location determination. For this reason alternative techniques have been developed for position/location determination in indoor settings. Some of these alternative techniques use Radio Frequency (RF) based location determination. Such systems typically make use of multiple radio frequency (RF) transmitters with known locations, also known as anchor nodes or beacons. Other alternative techniques may make use of Visible Light Communication (VLC) transmitters with known locations or beacons which may make use of the usually fairly dense lighting infrastructure.
Similar to an outdoor location system, an indoor location system provides a service to consumers hereafter end-users; a service that end-users will eventually rely on. It is therefore important that the indoor location service is reliable. One aspect of reliability for an end-user is the accuracy of the location that is being reported. Another aspect of reliability is the continuity of the location being reported. A further aspect of reliability is the availability.
Generally an indoor location system will be deployed by a customer that will order such an indoor location system from a supplier. The customer is typically the party that owns/deploys the indoor location system, notably this party may also be the party that offers services based on the indoor location system, but this need not be the case. Consider e.g. a scenario wherein an airport owner also owns and deploys an indoor location system. Airlines and shops that are not necessarily affiliated with the airport owner could offer services based on the indoor location system.
The deployment of an indoor location system will generally incur cost on the customer; as a result the customer will want to make sure that he can recuperate this cost. The cost can be earned back through the services provided based on the indoor location system functionality. In the above example the airport owner will need to recover his investment from the parties that offer services based on the indoor location system. As a result a mechanism is needed that supports such a diverse and complex scenario as the above airport. For paying location based service providers it is important that there are no free-riders; the system therefore also needs to be tamper-resilient.
Notably the above complexity needs to be hidden from the end-user; in a sense that accommodating the above functionality should not come at a loss of ease of use for the end-user.
A further complicating factor in rolling-out a complex system as the system above is that various parties in the system will need to develop and test their part of the system independently from the others. For example, when a large chain of shops rolls out an chain-wide indoor location system, it will be rolled out on a per shop basis; however while some of the stores are still in the process of testing the system, others may already be using the system to provide location based services to end-users.
What is needed thus is a flexible system that can also support the various life-cycles and/or roll-out scenarios that a large scale indoor location system might require.
The systems and methods presented below provide solutions designed to address at least some of these and other challenges.